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Robert Stroud better known as the Birdman of Alcatraz was in prison for the killing of F.K. Van Dahmer in Juneau, Alaska when he committed his second murder. On March 26, 1916 he stabbed to death prison guard Andrew Turner in front of 1,200 witnesses in the mess hall after Turner criticized Stroud for a minor rule infraction. Stroud was tried and sentenced to die on May 27th but, after three trials and four years, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, after his mother appealed to President Woodrow Wilson.

On March 25, 1932, The U.S. Supreme Court hands down its decision in the case of Powell v. Alabama. The case arose out of the infamous Scottsboro case, where 9 young black men were arrested and accused of raping two white women on train in Alabama. The boys were fortunate to barely escape a lynch mob, but were railroaded into convictions and death sentences.

On March 24, 1998, Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, shoot their classmates and teachers in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Golden, the younger of the two boys, asked to be excused from his class, pulled a fire alarm and then ran to join Johnson in a wooded area 100 yards away from the school's gym. As the students streamed out of the building, Johnson and Golden opened fire and killed four students and a teacher.

NEW YORK — The man who spent 23 years in prison before being cleared of the 1990 murder of a rabbi suffered a heart attack on his second day of freedom Friday.

An attorney for David Ranta told The New York Times that the former inmate had a serious heart attack Friday night and was being treated at a local hospital.

A judge vacated the conviction of the 58-year-old on Thursday afternoon after a reinvestigation of his case cast serious doubt on evidence used to convict him in the cold-blooded shooting of the Brooklyn rabbi.

“I’m overwhelmed. I feel like I’m under water, swimming. Like I said from the beginning, I had nothing to do with this case,” Ranta said after leaving state court in Brooklyn.

Ranta was found guilty of murdering Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, who was shot on Feb. 8, 1990 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The murder happened on Clymer Avenue as a suspect tried to rob a diamond courier, who escaped unharmed.

Brooklyn prosecutors had recently concluded that Ranta was innocent in the death of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, who was killed by a bandit fleeing a botched robbery.

Werzberger was getting into his car when the suspect then grabbed him, shot him in the forehead, jumped in Werzberger’s car and drove away.

Though no physical evidence linked Ranta to the crime, a jury convicted him based on witness testimony and circumstantial evidence. Ranta fit the wanted man’s description of being blond and athletic.

On March 23, 1979, Guillermo Novo and Alvin Ross Diaz are sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States. The murder to place on September 21, 1976, when a car bomb exploded while victims, Orlando Letelier, and his friends Michael and Ronni Moffitt were driving on Washington D.C.'s Embassy Row.

On March 22, 1984, seven teachers at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California are indicted on child molestation charges by a Los Angeles County grand jury after hearing testimony from 18 children. Among the charged are Peggy McMartin Buckey, the head of the school and her son Ray Buckey.

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998.

Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: from organized crime to serial killers, from capital punishment to prisons, from historical crimes to celebrity crime, from assassinations to government corruption, from justice issues to innocent cases, from crime films to books about crime. Read More